The first “smoking” of tobacco seen by Europeans was that of the Caribs or Indians of San Domingo. They used a very curious sort of tubular pipe, shaped like the letter Y. The diverging arms were placed one up each nostril, and the end of the stem held in the smoke of burning tobacco-leaves, which was thus “sniffed up” into the nose. The North American Indians, on the other hand, had pipes very similar to those still in use. The natives of South America smoked the rolled leaf (cigars), chewed it, and took it as snuff.
It has been suggested that in Asia smoking of some kind of dried herbs may have been a habit before tobacco was introduced--since even Herodotus states that the Scythians were accustomed to inhale the smoke of burning weeds, and showed their enjoyment of it by howling like dogs! But investigation does not support the view that anything corresponding to individual or personal “smoking” existed. “Bang” or “hashish” (the Indian hemp) was not “smoked,” but swallowed as a kind of paste before the introduction of tobacco-smoking in the East--as we may gather from the stories of the “Arabian Nights”--although the practice of smoking hemp (which is the chief constituent of “bang”) and also of smoking the narcotic herb “henbane,” has now been established. Opium was, and is, eaten in India, not “smoked.” The “smoking” of opium is a Chinese invention of the eighteenth century.
The Oriental hookah suggests a history anterior to the use of tobacco, but nothing is known of it. The word signifies a cocoanut-shell, and is applied to the jar (sometimes actually a cocoanut) containing perfumed water, through which smoke from a pipe, fixed so as to dip into the water, is drawn by a long tube with mouthpiece. It seems possible that this apparatus was in use for inhaling perfume by means of bubbles of air drawn through rose-water or such liquids, before tobacco-smoking was introduced, and that the tobacco-pipe and the perfume-jar were then combined. But travellers before the year 1600 do not mention the existence of the hookah in Persia or in India, though as soon as tobacco came into use this apparatus is described by Floris, in 1614, and by Olearius, in 1633, and by all subsequent travellers.